Stuart Davis: A Little Matisse, a Lot of Jazz, All American

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“The Mellow Pad” (1945-51) in the exhibition “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times; All Rights Reserved, Estate of Stuart Davis /Licensed by VAGA, New York

In 1908, Henri Matisse tried some damage control. Alarmed that his new work was being dismissed as a provoking joke, he responded no, no, no, the critics had him all wrong: His aim was to create the opposite, a soothing, antidepressant art, the visual equivalent of a well-padded armchair. A few decades later, Stuart Davis, who admired Matisse enough to crib from him, was pitching his own radical art as an embodiment of optimism and pleasure of a particularly American kind.

He didn’t venture a furniture analogy, though an apt one might have been to a La-Z-Boy recliner, one with cigarette burns and beer bottle rings on the armrests and a jazz beat thumping up through the seat. A chair good for a quick studio snooze, but easy to jump out of when you felt impelled to add one more crucial stroke to a painting in progress.

This is the artist we find in “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a restless, zestful exhibition that’s both broad enough to be a survey and sufficiently focused to qualify as a thematic study. It isn’t, however, a full-blown retrospective and isn’t meant to be. Davis’s very early art is missing and that’s quite a bit of work for an artist who got going very young.

He was born in 1892 in Philadelphia, where his father, a newspaper illustrator, was one of a group of young painters, including William Glackens and John Sloan, who took cues from a magnetic, slightly older figure, Robert Henri. Henri was promoting a new kind of American art, fundamentally urban and based on the observed realities of everyday life. When he moved to New York City in 1900, his followers went too. Eventually, Davis, dropping out of high school, joined them, determined to make art his career.

Manhattan delivered an array of heady stimulants, most of them habituating: alcohol, cigarettes, leftist politics, African-American music and, in 1913, European modernism in the Armory Show. What Davis saw in that exhibition had him sitting bolt upright in astonishment: Gauguin and Matisse using colors that had no connection to nature; Cubism shattering forms, flattening space, turning words — newspaper headlines, product labels — into objects. Davis, though hooked on the new Modernism, didn’t know what to do with it and for a while longer stuck with New York scenes and landscapes painted in Gloucester, Mass.

This is the work, high-polish journeyman stuff, that the present show, organized by Barbara Haskell of the Whitney (assisted by Sarah Humphreville) and Harry Cooper of the National Gallery in Washington, leaves out. It starts instead with Davis the fresh-minted Modernist, painting meticulous, trompe-l’oeil versions of Cubist collages that have local materials — Lucky Strike tobacco packaging, comic strips — as content. In these tiny pictures from the early 1920s, he defines the lasting tension in his art between American-derived realism and European-derived abstraction, between populism and classicism.

Now he’s off the street and in the studio doing still lifes: a bottle of Odol mouthwash — “It Purifies” reads the label — looks as cool as an archaic Greek goddess; a tabletop jumble of rubber gloves and an eggbeater becomes a vision of balanced but teetery architecture. By now, he’s pretty much dropped Henri’s version of realism. On a visit to Paris in 1928 Davis tirelessly roamed the city, but his paintings of it suggest stage sets, as do his subsequent views of Gloucester and New York. Yet in each case, something — a shop sign, a type of building, the color of the air — tells you, in shorthand-fashion, where you are. (He wasn’t the son of a news illustrator for nothing.)

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Stuart Davis’s “American Painting” (1932/1942-54).CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times; All Rights Reserved, Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York

Place was important to him, but the modern world was increasingly about movement and he wanted to picture that. A 1931 painting, “New York-Paris No. 2,” put us in both cities simultaneously, with a Hotel de France set against the Third Avenue El. In the exuberant “Swing Landscape” of 1938, a mural commissioned by the Works Progress Administration for a Brooklyn housing project but never installed, we see bits and pieces of Gloucester — ships, buoys, lobster traps — but basically we’re in a whole new universe of jazzy patterns and blazing colors, a landscape defined not by signs but by sensations: sound, rhythm, friction.

As you move through the show, you’re moving through time. And change, over time, becomes one of the exhibition’s main themes. You get a vivid sense of the time, measured in labor, that Davis put into making individual pieces from a display of 14 annotated ballpoint-pen studies that represent the mere beginnings of a 1956 painting called “Package Deal.” You see the look of his art, though not its upbeat spirit, change over years. After finishing his dense, cacophonous “The Mellow Pad,” a grueling six-year project, in 1951, his compositions start to untangle. His palette simplifies. His use of words, or scriptlike arabesques, grows. And more and more you see him moving back and forth in time, to revisit and reuse themes from his past.

A 1927 Cubist still life, “Percolator,” done almost entirely in beiges and grays, resurfaces, intact but high-colored and festooned with words, in the 1951 “Owh! In San Pao.” And on one wall, four ingenious variations on a single design — Davis likened them to jazz improvisations — done between 1932 and 1956 hang side by side. Individual Davises have been changed, and changed again. One called “American Painting” is multiply dated “1932/1942-54,” indicating that it is the product of several revisionist campaigns, of which there is poignant internal evidence.

The original 1932 composition of “American Painting” incorporates both Davis’s first use of an extended written text — the phrase “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” from a Duke Ellington hit of the day — and an image of four small male figures posed together as if for a photograph. They represent the artists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, John Graham and Davis himself, who were, at the time, close friends. Davis and Gorky parted ways, possibly over political differences, and by 1954, Gorky was dead, which could explain why Davis marked his figure with a kind of canceling-out black X.

Davis’s biography, shaped by struggles with poverty, alcoholism and critical neglect, all reversed in late career, is the subject of a remarkable chronicle composed by Ms. Haskell for the catalog, but is only lightly touched on in the exhibition. The artist, scornful of Abstract Expressionism’s bleeding-heart tendencies, would have preferred it that way, though in places a personal story comes through in the show, one being at the very end. His final painting, unfinished, with tape still attached to its surface, prominently features the French word “fin” — “end” — on the upper left side. He added it the night before he died of a stroke in 1964, at the age of 71.

The last New York museum survey of Davis’s career was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991 and caused only a moderate stir. A general revival of interest in painting since then, particularly abstraction, gives his art a sense of freshness and pertinence that it didn’t project then. Some of his thinking about art, however, seems locked in the past.

I’m thinking about the way he identified his art as American, a product of, and a homage to, “the wonderful place we live in,” a place of entrepreneurial appetites and Walt Whitman-esque enthusiasms. I’m thinking of his insistence that art’s primary moral role is, or should be, to add pleasure to the world, to give an illusion of ordering chaos, as opposed to facing it and staring it down.

Whitman is a much darker poet than is usually thought. The moral chaos of the Civil War haunted him and complicated him, and continues to make him feel contemporary. As for America’s entrepreneurial appetite, suffice to say it doesn’t always look so positive now. When it comes to a critical evaluation, it’s Andy Warhol, cynical soul and sometimes (wrongly) taken as Davis’s heir, who got it right.

What Davis got right was belief: the belief that he was doing the one sure, positive thing he could do, and that he would keep doing it, no matter what, in failure or success, sickness or health. That’s the lesson young artists can take away from his show, along with an experience of painting that’s conceptually razor-sharp and completely worked through, with all fat trimmed off, all air squeezed out: an art of truly honest weight.

“Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” runs through Sept. 25 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600; whitney.org. The show travels to the National Gallery in Washington, Nov. 20-March 5, then to the de Young in San Francisco and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., in 2017.